Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Science plays an important role in the judiciary. Science can provide essential information that may establish correlational or causal relationships between events, guiding fair judgments. Questions that judges confront today increasingly involve scientific sources and tools that many of them might not be too familiar with. Even though the judges’ role is to interpret the law and apply it to each case brought to their courtroom, the cases themselves are increasingly related to scientific issues.

The paper will consist of three essays that collectively evaluate how science is used in climate change litigation in the United States from 1990 to 2018. Funded by the NSF, this research uses mixed methods approach with a sample of approximately 222 lawsuits that discuss scientific information in the field of climate change in their documentation. The author evaluated 1) the different types of scientific evidence in these lawsuits and their influence on the judicial decisions, 2) the demand for and supply of scientific information in and around courtrooms, and 3) the framing of scientific uncertainty in judicial opinions authored by federal level court judges. The result of this project can potentially transform our understanding of how science is introduced, discussed, framed, and used in the judicial branch and, more broadly, in the field of government policymaking.